Since these designers charge ungodly prices for their clothes, it makes one wonder how one of them could go bankrupt so fast? You buy a bolt of fabric, sew up a dress (there’s no expensive embellishments on most of Pinto’s designs), you sell the dress for $10k, and then you sew another one. What’s wrong with that picture? She got tons of free publicity from Oprah and Michelle, got written up in all the columns. You’d think that she’d make enough profit to keep her business going more than a year, even if she had to hire the seamstress and the bolt of cloth cost $200.
If it was that easy, why isn’t everyone with a sewing machine doing it?
A brief moment of PR with a high profile client doesn’t cover the years it takes of losing money on high rent for the retail location, high costs for the must-do fashion shows (models don’t work for free and the shows like Bryant Park aren’t free or even cheap, IF you can get in). Photography costs for the PR needed to promote the line are exorbitant. Young designers work and live in the same space. They have to scramble to find venues and showrooms with which to get the notice they need to get the high-profile clients in the first place. And you may charge 5 figures once you are at the pinnacle, but that is only for the custom work. Ready-to-wear is the place where you make enough to cover living expenses without a day job. For that, you need a factory. You could try to hire women, usually immigrants, to do piecework in their homes, but that is a nightmare of quality control and, in some areas, labor laws.
To produce a line takes a patron, private money or a factor, who charges interest. Showrooms charge the designers in order to pay for their space and their reps. You can make a sale to a big department store and never get paid, or get paid so late that it doesn’t matter. There used to be an entire area of Manhattan where the stores opened at 11 because they went to the showrooms at 9 to buy the broken designer lots they sold at a discount (it’s been 25 years since I was there, so it has probably changed). It is a brutal industry in which the top performers are being knocked off in a sweat shop somewhere remote from the sales venue so quickly that the line is dead before it is a season old. You have to work a year or more in advance, meaning you have to subscribe to the Color Board and be in the fashion loop to even have an idea about what is going to sell that far in advance. A line being produced by the designer with no help takes at least 3 months. If you hire a seamstress, you have to have a good contract that makes it clear that you own the design and the pattern and even then, the seamstress can sue if you hit it big, claiming she did all the design work when all she did was change something on the pattern to make it easier to produce. Even if you win the lawsuit, they can bankrupt you. Or the Feds can say that the seamstress was an employee, not a contract worker and you are on the hook for employment taxes.
Horrid business. Two generations of my family tried it and failed for all the reasons above, even the one who had solid experience as a buyer for retail prior to launching her own line. I gave it a try in the 70s as a custom seamstress, in the 80s with handwovens, selling retail at juried shows and wholesale at trade shows. It was good for about 6 years or so and then the hand dyed, handwoven imports from India began to appear in Walmart. What we were selling for $200 was now available for $10 and that is not an exaggeration. One of my reps made some sales to Bendels. I was so excited!! Until I walked past the store and saw that my work was being used as background props for some other accessories.
There is a very limited market for the high-end fashion. Today, frugal chic is in, even for the women with money to burn. They may spend $1500 for designer jeans and a cashmere sweatshirt, but they have rooms full of clothing and shoes, much of which they can wear forever. They may patronize a pet designer who is *undiscovered* for awhile, and then, when that designer has made it to the point where they can charge high prices, they all flock off to follow someone even newer.
I like Pinto’s work, actually. It may also be a detriment, in this political climate, to have your line tied with an unpopular administration. A lot of the money available for fashion comes from Republicans.